Empty Boat: Poems (New Odyssey (Paperback))

In finely wrought, image-driven poems, The Empty Boat explores the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of the human relationship to the natural world, asking how nature speaks to us and what wisdom and solace it may offer the tragic aspects of our lives. From haunting poems that give voice to losses and seek redemption in wilderness, to those that celebrate ecstatic moments of mystical vision, the book's trajectory moves ever toward Taoist landscapes of thought. The book concludes with the return of love and re-imaginings of the relationship between presence and emptiness in our lives.

Michael Sowder is the author of the T. S. Eliot Prize-winning book, The Empty Boat and two chapbook collections, "A Calendar of Crows and "Cafe Midnight." He also wrote about Walt Whitman's poetry in Whitman's Ecstatic Union. In addition to writing poetry, Sowder writes creative nonfiction about the human relationship to the natural world, and about Buddhism, Hinduism, Christian Mysticism. His essays have appeared in "Shambhala Sun," "The Wasatch Journal," "The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review," and many other venues. Michael Sowder is associate professor of English and adjunct professor of Religious Studies at Utah State Univeristy. He is a meditation teacher in the Cache Valley Buddhist Sangha and the Amrita Sangha for Integral Spirituality in Logan, Utah.